FCC Commissioners Accepted Pricey Kennedy Center Gala Gifts From Paramount as It Sought Approval for Billion-Dollar Mergers

Details

On July 15, 2026, ProPublica reported that Federal Communications Commission members have for years accepted expensive Kennedy Center honors gala tickets from CBS and its parent company, Paramount—gifts that ethics experts say pose a blatant conflict of interest because the commission regulates the network and has repeatedly been asked to approve the company's multibillion-dollar mergers. The reporting, by Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Corey G. Johnson, drew on a decade of ethics disclosure records.

The Gifts

The Kennedy Center's annual honors gala—a black-tie event held in December 2025, hosted by President Trump, that prioritized tickets for people who donated more than $75,000 to the center—feted Hollywood icon Sylvester Stallone, the glam rock band Kiss, and disco pioneer Gloria Gaynor. Among the attendees were two lower-profile government officials whose regulatory decisions had been crucial to the gala's broadcast sponsor, CBS, and its parent company, Paramount.

Five months after casting a decisive vote approving Paramount's historic $8 billion merger with Skydance Media, Commissioner Olivia Trusty and a guest attended the celebration thanks to tickets gifted to her by Paramount worth more than $12,000, according to ethics disclosure records obtained by ProPublica.

The other commissioner who approved that merger, FCC Chair Brendan Carr, watched with his wife from a private skybox alongside Paramount CEO David Ellison and other Paramount and CBS executives. Such seats sold for $125,000 a ticket, according to Kennedy Center guidelines. Because the FCC had not yet made Carr's financial disclosure for the year public, it was unclear whether Paramount gifted him the premium seats. His previous financial statements show he has accepted tickets at least seven times since his 2017 appointment, totaling over $63,000 in gifts.

The Conflict of Interest

Federal ethics rules ban employees from taking gifts from any entity that does business with, is regulated by, or seeks official action from their agency. Four ethics experts told ProPublica that by accepting the premium tickets, Trusty and Carr compromised the FCC's impartiality and should not take part in any upcoming decision on the Warner Bros. merger.

"There's no way that any top federal regulator should ever, ever accept a gift from a regulated company with interests their work will foreseeably affect," said Walter Shaub, who led the federal Office of Government Ethics from 2013 to 2017. "The appearance of taking gifts like that is terrible. What's at stake is nothing less than the public's trust in government."

Virginia Canter—who served as an ethics lawyer at the White House, Treasury Department, and Securities and Exchange Commission under Presidents George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama, and now works as chief counsel for ethics and anti-corruption at the nonpartisan Democracy Defenders Fund—said the commissioners cannot participate in the matter without damaging the integrity of the government's decision-making. "This is shocking. Pretty disturbing, that's what I would say. I just don't understand what they were thinking," she said.

Kedric Payne, general counsel and senior director of ethics at the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center, noted that federal rules require agencies to weigh the market value of the attendance, its relevance to the agency, any sensitive pending matters involving the donor, and whether accepting free tickets creates an appearance of preferential treatment. "The ethics rules are designed to prevent this exact situation," he said, calling it an "obvious conflict of interest" for an official to "accept expensive gifts from anyone with decisions pending before the agency. This matters because it makes the public question whether official decisions are free from the improper influence of wealthy special interests."

The "Widely Attended Gathering" Defense

An FCC spokesperson said agency ethics officers have for years cleared commissioner appearances, finding them consistent with ethics law. "FCC Chairs and officials have attended the same event, in the same ways, consistently from the Trump Administration to the Biden Administration to the Obama Administration," the FCC said. "There has been no change in recent years." An FCC official familiar with the legal guidance said commissioners were told the event met the criteria for the "widely attended gathering" exception to the gift rules.

Shaub called the justification outrageous. "It's no excuse to say that you took the gift because everyone else was doing it or that your agency has had a bad habit of indulging in gift taking for a long time," he said. "That kind of explanation doesn't work for school children, and it sure as hell doesn't work for government officials who are supposed to have better judgment than a fifth grader."

The exemption to the gift rules allows free entry to gatherings that are widely attended and paid for by third parties, but only if certain conditions are met: the event must "further agency programs or operations," and the agency's interest in an official attending must outweigh any "concern that the employee may be, or may appear to be, improperly influenced in the performance of official duties." A 2009 Office of Government Ethics memo gave federal employees the right to attend Kennedy Center events but explicitly barred accepting free attendance "offered by persons other than the Kennedy Center and its trustees, officers and employees." The ethics office tightened its gift requirements in 2016, warning officials to avoid any appearance "of loss of impartiality," and clarified in a 2007 memo that performing arts presentations would not qualify even if they include a reception where officials can mingle.

Canter called it a "stretch" for the FCC to invoke the exemption for a show where famous musicians perform and celebrities laud honorees. "It's not what we would consider a widely attended gathering," she said. Shaub added that it would be "hard to understand what compelling interest the FCC could think it had in letting its commissioners" attend the gala, asking, "What possible reason could have outweighed the obvious ethics concerns?" Federal rules require written authorization for an official to accept free entry to a widely attended gathering; the FCC did not respond to requests to provide the authorizations or say who signed them, and two senior agency ethics officials, Kathleen Fulp and Lauren Northrop, did not respond to requests for comment.

A Bipartisan, Decade-Long Pattern

Despite their oversight role, FCC members have long enjoyed a night at the Kennedy Center courtesy of CBS or its parent company. Seven of the ten commissioners who served since 2016 accepted tickets worth more than $260,000, according to ProPublica's analysis of ethics disclosures. Carr's predecessor, Jessica Rosenworcel, appointed FCC chair by President Biden, attended regularly before stepping down in January 2025. The lone commissioner who accepted no gift, Nathan Simington, said he received invites from CBS and Paramount but turned them down because it "wasn't my cup of tea." Melissa Zukerman, Paramount's chief communications officer, said it was a decades-long "CBS practice to invite government officials from both parties" to the show.

The gifts extended beyond CBS. A review of ten years of disclosures shows commissioners accepted paid trips from various sponsors to appear at banquets and conferences, some from other FCC-regulated media companies: NBCUniversal, ABC-Disney, and Fox News, for instance, paid for commissioners to attend White House Correspondents' Association dinners. The total value of the combined gifts topped $308,000, but the vast majority came from CBS and its parent company. Carr, who joined the FCC as a staffer in 2012 and rose to general counsel before Trump appointed him a commissioner, has accepted tickets annually except in 2020, when the event was postponed due to the pandemic.

Gifts Amid Pending Mergers

The gala attendance repeatedly coincided with matters Paramount had before the commission. Paramount filed for FCC approval of its Skydance merger in September 2024. A month later, the FCC launched an investigation of CBS after a conservative group complained about a "60 Minutes" interview with Kamala Harris, and Trump filed a lawsuit alleging the network deceptively edited it. Less than two weeks after his November 2024 election victory, Trump said he would appoint Carr as FCC chair; Carr quickly accused CBS of biased coverage and called it an obstacle to approving the merger. That December, Carr and three other commissioners—Rosenworcel, Anna Gomez, and Geoffrey Starks—accepted Kennedy Center gala tickets from Paramount worth a combined $48,156.

On January 16, 2025, days before stepping down, Rosenworcel announced the FCC was dismissing the election complaint against CBS. Days later, incoming chair Carr reopened the investigation. CBS then agreed to pay Trump $16 million to resolve his lawsuit, and two days after Trump posted that he had received the settlement money, the FCC took up the Skydance merger. To meet Carr's demands, Paramount agreed to appoint an independent ombudsperson to evaluate bias claims and pledged to eliminate its diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives. By then Starks and Simington had stepped down and Trusty, a Trump appointee, had been confirmed. Trusty and Carr voted to approve; Gomez voted against, blasting the "never-before-seen forms of government control over newsroom decisions and editorial judgment."

With the merger greenlit, Ellison set his sights on Warner Bros. Discovery. Warner initially rebuffed Paramount and, on December 5, 2025—two days before the gala—accepted a bid from Netflix for its studio and streaming assets. On the night of the gala, Trump told reporters the Netflix deal "could be a problem" and that he planned to get directly involved in the regulatory approval, while Carr sat with Ellison in the skybox. Gomez, who declined Paramount's invitation over "serious concerns about press independence," was not there. Hours after the gala ended, Paramount announced its hostile takeover bid of Warner Bros. Discovery. About three months later, Carr publicly endorsed Paramount over Netflix on CNBC, promising swift approval.

The Recusal and Quorum Problem

The FCC usually has five commissioners but currently has only three: Republicans Carr and Trusty and Democrat Gomez. Any full-commission vote on the Warner Bros. merger would likely come down to Carr and Trusty over Gomez. Because the FCC requires a three-commissioner quorum to vote, any recusal could leave the panel unable to decide the merger at all. Ethics experts said Carr and Trusty should nonetheless recuse. Under the gift rules, an official who accepts an improper gift can avoid recusal only by promptly reimbursing the donor its face value—but, as Shaub put it, "if you refuse to repay the donor, I don't see how anything short of recusal could remotely remediate the problem."

Carr could bypass a full commission vote entirely by delegating authority to FCC staff, as he did with the Nexstar-Tegna deal. But the experts warned that any decision—by the full commission or by staff at the chair's direction—is likely to be challenged, and said the Justice Department should investigate potential violations of federal rules. Richard Painter, a former White House ethics attorney under George W. Bush, said courts can grow skeptical when a regulatory agency is shown to have violated ethics rules: "A judge may very well say that the merger decision of the FCC isn't worth jack because the process was corrupted."

The stakes are large. The FCC's review is one of the final hurdles facing a roughly $110 billion consolidation that would unite Paramount Skydance with Warner Bros., bringing Paramount+ and HBO Max, CBS and CNN, and scores of other channels under one company. More than 5,000 entertainment workers—including Robert De Niro, Javier Bardem, Joaquin Phoenix, and Glenn Close—signed an open letter warning the deal would compromise "the integrity, independence, and diversity of our industry." On July 13, 2026, California, New York, and ten other Democratic-led states filed a lawsuit seeking to block the merger under federal and state antitrust laws, and regulators in the U.K. and European Union are separately reviewing the deal—including the Middle Eastern sovereign wealth funds from Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Abu Dhabi backing it.

Neither Carr nor Trusty responded to ProPublica's requests for comment. Gomez said she followed agency advice when she attended in 2023 and 2024.

Related Coverage in This Project

This entry documents the regulators' side of the Paramount saga. For the parallel thread—Trump's use of merger-approval leverage over the Ellison family, the editorial changes at CBS, and the DOJ's clearance of the Warner Bros. deal over career-staff objections—see 2025-12-24-trump-ellison-cbs-conservative.md. The $16 million CBS/Paramount "60 Minutes" settlement is also covered in 2025-12-11-trump-defamation-lawsuits-media.md.